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The beginning of the end? AOL to go its own way Dec 9

Back in the mid-90s, I really thought that AOL (America Online) couldn’t keep competing against the tidalwave of new ISPs that were offering Internet connectivity for much less, not to mention without the horrible bandwidth-sucking AOL application in an age of dial-up modems. I was quite wrong. Relatively few knew about those ‘other’ ISPs and AOL thrived.

In what may retrospectively be seen as hubris, AOL merged with media giant Time Warner and the company was even know for a few years as AOL Time Warner.

The merger was a mess. The 2 companies never really merged and benefited from any potential symbiotic relationships. AOL later became a subsidiary, and now they’re being thrown off altogether.

Will AOL survive by itself? I don’t see it. I imagine they’ll need to get absorbed by another ISP or tech company in order to carry on.

Yahoo! Mail still #1, but for how much longer?


Image via CrunchBase

ComScore shows Yahoo Mail is still the world’s leader in e-mail services, but the bad news (for Yahoo) is that Google’s Gmail is the fastest growing service. Hotmail is still #2, and AOL just slipped to #4 after Gmail who leapfrogged them to go to #3.

Four years ago when we sized up Hotmail vs Yahoo vs Gmail, Gmail was the clear winner and has only become progressively better. Witness all of the improvements and feature additions that they’ve [Google] have put into Gmail.

For example, this week Google showed off another killer feature – the ability to import your e-mail from other accounts into Gmail.

Do yourself a favor and get a Gmail account.

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